Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know?

Sunday, 7 April 2013

A Kink in the Chain of Influence

(As all the films I've watched this
week have been research for a new project, there will be no Films
This Week, for the reasons explained
here. So I thought I'd write this post instead).

A recent conversation with a
friend of mine got me thinking once more about Argo,which I praised here,
writing: 'look, [Argo is] saying, how
good mainstream films were in the 1970s – let's go back to making films like
that'.In
other words,as both my post and my conversation with my friend made clear, the joy
of Argo seems to be the fact that it
harks back to the past, to a time when the movie brats were coming of age and
mainstream films were borrowing liberally from European art-house cinema.

This era (1970s Hollywood), is
sometimes seen as something of a 'Golden' era, a time when auteurs ran rampant
before their gate of heaven collapsed. So glorious were the achievements of the
filmmakers of this period, they spawned a new generation of offspring:
directors who aspired to be like their heroes, and who would reference and
steal from them in the same way that the movie brats were borrowing from the art-houses.

And now, from talking to several classes
of students on my Life
Just Is University tour, it
would seem there is another generation on the rise: one influenced by the sons
of the movie brats, who have no interest in art-house, and for whom mainstream cinema
rules all.

This is not a problem in and of
itself, and yet… I don't wish to make so bold a claim as saying that mainstream
cinema is declining in quality. There are plenty of genuinely good, big budget,
commercial films still being made. And yet… Surely the fact that Argo has been so popular proves that we
still have something to learn from the movie brats. Or, more precisely, from
their influences…

What made the films of the 70s so
fresh, so exciting, so powerful, was that they were borrowing from the great art
filmmakers, and in doing so were creating commercial work with artistic appeal.
By dropping this influence, and seemingly only wishing to borrow from the
mainstream filmmakers who have gone before them, it seems like the new
generation is destined to end in erosion, with all the art slowly dissolving
away. Simply put, I fear mainstream cinema will eat itself.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

(On a tangential note: film may
eat itself in another way too. I'm amazed by the amount of young filmmakers who
think it's okay to pirate films because they're poor aspiring filmmakers – and who
fail to see the irony of this. So, to sum up: if any young filmmakers happen to
be reading this: stop pirating films, and go and buy a Bergman boxset).